How to deploy Dell AppAssure smart agents

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Learn how to deploy smart agents"�and about the different options you can choose to protect your workloads"�in Dell AppAssure.

In this segment, we're going to deploy agents. In this environment, I only actually have two agents that I'm going to deploy to. And we have two different methods for deployment. I'm going to use both of them. So they're not going to be as rich as you would normally see if you're deploying to a large environment.
First one is a one-off. We're going to just click on Protect Machine. And we're going to put in the host name. Put in our domain name/username and our password. Now, because the agent's not installed, we get an error message that says, would you like to try to deploy the agent remotely? We say yes.
And obviously, we can deploy the agent just simply by running the executable on the box. And when we hit Protect Machine, that agent will then just automatically be added. But since no agent was found, it's asking.
So we'll enter the password one more time, a display name, which I'm going to leave the same. We'll choose a repository. And then we'll choose an encryption key. Then we hit Deploy.
And we can see the agent deployment has started. To monitor this, we can go to the Events tab. We can see it here, we can even expand, and we can get more detailed information on the job itself. Or we can hit the Details button, which will bring up a complete dialog that'll tell us everything that's going on.
We can also choose to open it in a new window so that we can have a separate window open, monitoring that particular event. And then go back to the core, where we can actually go to the next section under Bulk Deploy. And we can choose any one of a number of ways.
We can manually enter something. So let's say we have a list of servers that we're going to deploy to and we would like to just simply enter them in one by one. We can hit Manual. We can also browse the vCenter environment, or directly on an ESX or ESXi host, and pick up the machines that are running in that environment.
The other option, which we're going to use here, is Active Directory. So we're simply going to put in the name of the domain. It has to be a fully qualified domain name. So we'll put in AADEMO.local and our user name, which is administrator, and our password. Then we can hit Connect. And this will give us a list of all the machines within the domain.
So we're going to choose the other machine, the AAEXCH. That's our Exchange server. And then we'll go ahead and hit Add.
That machine is now added to the list. We could have selected all the machines and deploy automatically. So the first thing we're do here is hit Verify. It's going to go and communicate with the Exchange server and make sure that it can actually talk to it.
OK. So it is ready for deployment. We can go ahead and hit the Deploy button. Now, we see another one has started here for AA Exchange.
Back to our SQL event, we can see that it is waiting for machine availability. That means that it has already deployed the agent. And it's now in the process of rebooting.
After an agent is deployed, it does require a reboot. If you are looking to do this in a more manual fashion where you are not automatically rebooting, then you can run the Executable. Or we can use the Bulk Deploy and come up with some options there.
So while we're waiting on that, let's go back to the main screen. We'll go to the Events. We can see that we have our other deployment running here. And it's at 13% for the Exchange server. We'll go ahead and open that in another window.
Now, the difference between the two, since I was deploying the agent on the SQL Server, as part of adding it for protection, once this process completes, it's automatically going to add it with the parameters that we've chosen-- in other words, the repository, the encryption key. The Exchange server, on the other hand, is just going to do the deployment. Then we'll use the Bulk Protect tool to add it for protection.
So this one is installing the package. That one is waiting for service availability, which means the system is online. Now, we're just waiting for the service to start.
We can go to the-- actually, if we saw here, you can see the Exchange server is on its way down. And our SQL Server is ready to be logged into. We'll go ahead and log in.
Go back to our core. And you can see here AASQL has succeeded. So that task has completed.
We're waiting for the Exchange server to come up. Now, out here, you can see that the SQL Server has been added. So we can see a summary of what's going on here in terms of the actual system. You can see that we can see the SQL instance because we have the appropriate permissions. Tells us version information.
It set it up with a default of 60 minutes. So it's going to back up each volume every 60 minutes. And we can go in. And we can change that.
Let me go back to our Exchange-- waiting for machine availability. So that means we can go log in over here. We can go ahead and log in here.
Now, it's protecting the remote machine. Actually, it did add it automatically-- perfect. So that completed successfully.
So as part of the initial deployment, the first thing that's going to happen on each one of these machines is it's going to take a base image. As you can see here, that process has begun. So it's taking a base image right now of the SQL Server. It should automatically kick in for the Exchange server as well. And that will begin momentarily.
By default, it'll do up to three machines at once. And you can go in and you can change that to back up as many as you select, from 1 to 99. Probably best to stay somewhere in the 3 to 8 range unless, of course, your core happens to be running on a very fast, beefy machine with lots of memory and lots of CPU.